Website maintenance: what it covers and what it costs per month
Maintenance is treated as insurance: we pay just in case something breaks. In practice most of the work is prevention rather than repair. A site nobody touches still stops working: browsers update, certificates expire, vulnerabilities appear in libraries, and the APIs it depends on change.
What maintenance covers
A reasonable contract usually includes:
- Uptime monitoring and alerts when the site goes down.
- Backups, and verification that they actually restore.
- Updates to the platform, libraries and certificates.
- Patching vulnerabilities as they emerge.
- Fixing bugs in functionality that already worked.
- Minor content edits within an agreed allowance.
- A report of what was done in the period.
Check whether disaster recovery is included and within what timeframe. Backups nobody has ever restored are not backups.
How maintenance differs from new work
Maintenance keeps what exists working. A new feature, a new section, changed logic — that is development and is quoted separately.
The boundary between them is a frequent source of argument. Fixing a button that stopped working is maintenance. Adding a second button is development. Agree this before signing, or every task becomes a negotiation.
Pricing models
A monthly retainer with included hours. A fixed sum covering monitoring, updates and an agreed number of hours for tasks. Predictable for both sides and suits most clients.
Pay as you go. You pay only for work done. Cheaper when nothing happens, but monitoring and prevention are usually excluded — and those are what stop expensive failures.
A block of hours. Buy hours upfront and draw them down. Flexible, but needs disciplined tracking and often leads to disputes about how long something took.
What drives the price: system complexity, number of integrations, required response time, and whether weekend cover is needed.
Response time is the key clause
More important than the price. Response time is how quickly the contractor replies; resolution time is how quickly they fix it. They are different, and many contracts specify only the first.
Normal practice is tiering by severity: site down or payments failing, something important behaving wrongly, a minor annoyance. Each tier gets its own target.
Clarify separately what happens at night and at weekends. If your shop trades around the clock while support runs ten to six on weekdays, a Saturday outage costs you two days of sales.
Why sites break on their own
Typical failures on sites nobody changed:
- An SSL certificate expired and browsers started warning visitors.
- A payment provider or courier changed their API.
- The host upgraded the language version and old code stopped running.
- Disk space ran out because of logs.
- The domain lapsed because the renewal notice went to a former employee.
- A library vulnerability was found, the site was compromised and filled with spam.
What to check before signing
Four questions worth asking:
- What counts as maintenance versus development, with examples.
- Response and resolution times by severity tier.
- Where backups live and how often restoration is tested.
- Who owns access to hosting, domain and repository — it should be you.
Questions people ask
How much does website maintenance cost per month?
It depends on system complexity, number of integrations, required response time and whether weekend cover is needed. Most often it is a monthly retainer with an included allowance of hours.
What does website maintenance include?
Uptime monitoring, backups, platform and library updates, vulnerability patching, fixing bugs in existing functionality, and minor content edits within an agreed allowance.
How is maintenance different from development?
Maintenance keeps what exists working. A new feature or changed logic is development, quoted separately. Agree the boundary before signing.
Do we need maintenance if the site works fine?
Yes. Sites break without being changed: certificates expire, third-party APIs change, hosting upgrades, library vulnerabilities appear. Most of maintenance is prevention rather than repair.
What is response time in a support contract?
How quickly the contractor acknowledges a request. Resolution time — how quickly they fix it — is a different thing. Good practice is separate targets per severity tier.
